So what's going on
here? Why would anyone find it necessary to edit over 100
different shots across three episodes to remove something as innocuous
as an apron? And who did this edit in the first place?

What's so offensive about an apron?
This is very similar to the whole Rougela controversy, and
not just because the group being stereotyped here are black
people.

With Rougela, you have to remember that it was the combination of stereotypical
attributes that led to people's outrage. It wasn't just the black skin or just the big red lips or just the way it wiggles its hips or
just its "full figure," to quote Ms.
Weatherford. Alone, those things
wouldn't have
raised an eyebrow. It's only when you combine all these into one
package that you get what many consider to be a racist
stereotype. Take away one aspect - the character's black
skin, for instance - and the problem no longer exists.

The same sort of thing is happening with Aloe. Many people
believed that she looked like the Mammy archetype,
a racist stereotype different from the "overweight drag queen
incarnation of Little Black
Sambo" stereotype that Rougela resembled. Aloe, being a full
figured (as far as we could tell from the earlier artwork) black woman
with an apron, large
hair, and a headband all combine to make the Gym Leader look like what
many people consider to be a racist stereotype. Take one of these
things away and the problem ceases to exist. Again, it's the combination of
stereotypes that's the problem here.

Changing Aloe's skin color was probably rejected for fear that it would
look like they were trying to whitewash the franchise, even though they
kind of already did the reverse of that with Rapla in Pokémon Battle Revolution.
Or maybe
they felt like removing her apron was the least intrusive change they
could have made? Whatever the reasoning, the apron was the aspect
that was chosen to be removed for international audiences.So why not just draw Aloe without the
apron on in the first
place? After all, this episode aired months after Sugimori
updated his artwork, right?Aloe was
officially revealed
to the public in the September 2010 issue of CoroCoro Comics that went on sale
in August 2010. In this issue, she's drawn with her old design,
and it's assumed that it was released without Game Freak realizing that
there would be any sort of backlash.

Now we don't know how much feedback the company got that prompted them
to make the change. Maybe fans complained and they changed the
design before word could spread? Or maybe Nintendo of America
gave Nintendo of Japan a panicked phone call and told them that there
was no way they could get away with releasing a character that looked
like that outside
Japan? Or maybe Game Freak did it themselves, changing their
minds after thinking things over? Whatever the case may be, the old stock
artwork you see above was removed from
the franchise's official Japanese site and replaced with a new
version by October of that same year. In this updated image, Aloe
has her apron slung over her
shoulder and she's striking a slightly different pose.

Now, let's look at the TV show. An episode of the animated series
takes about six months or so to
make, start to finish. We actually know for a
fact that the character model sheets for the episode
"The Shippou Gym Battle! Satoshi vs. the Gym Leader Aloe!!" were
being worked on as far back as June 17th, 2010. I think it's safe
to assume that the other two episodes were being worked on at around
the same time.

By the time the general public saw its first
glimpse of Aloe, the episodes in question were already two months into
production. And by the time the official artwork was changed,
they were already two thirds done. Animation work would have
already started by that
point, making it too late to go in and make any changes as major as a
character redesign. The animators had a deadline to meet, after
all, so they had to make the decision to finish the episode the way
they started and then go back and "fix" it later.

Now it's possible that the animators started work on the edited
versions before the episodes premiered on TV-Tokyo but weren't able to
finish them by the time they aired in December / January. But
that's just my speculation.

By the time the thirty-sixth episode aired ("The Fossil Revival!
Archaeos, the Ominous Ancient Bird!!"), the TV staff switched over to
the new version. Compared to how
long it took them to adopt Rougela's updated look, this is quite
fast.

The two manga series that have featured the character so far has drawn
her with her new design, but that's mainly due to the fact that manga
takes a lot less time to make than an episode of a TV series
does. A change in character design can happen much more quickly
in manga than it can in the TV series.

As of this writing, the actual video games themselves
and the TV series are the only media in Japan to feature Aloe with her
older
design. In the US, the video games are the only media to use her
old design.So who did this edit, anyway? The
Japanese animators? The English dubbers?
There is no doubt in my mind that this was an edit performed by the
original animators over in Japan. A mere look at the edit should
reveal why.

There is
absolutely no way a company like The Pokémon Company
International would have the resources to be
able to pull off anything like this. This isn't meant to be a
slight against them or anything; it's the simple truth.
TPCI is not an animation studio. They simply don't have the means
to do something like this.

Now the company can, and has,
done visual edits before. But the type of thing that was done to
Aloe is in a whole different league from changing text on a static
image. All they have to do with the latter is erase the original
text by clone brushing the background and then
replacing it with their own, like they did in the first episode of Diamond & Pearl, "Following a Maiden Voyage!"

With Aloe's apron, it's a different story. We tend to say that
the animators "erased Aloe's apron," but that's actually quite a
misleading way of phrasing it. It's not like the animators took a
rubber
eraser and went to work on these drawings until a white shirt'd blue
pants'd Aloe emerged on the screen. No, what they ended up doing
was redraw her form the neck down. A lot of the
show is done on computers now, so what they most likely did was remove
whatever layer contained Aloe's old body and replace it with a new
drawing of Aloe's body. It's a lot like editing layers in
Photoshop, only much more time consuming since they'd have to edit
about 30 frames for every one second of animation.

Assuming that
information in this
interview up on Pokébeach is still
current, The Pokémon Company International is sent copies of the
completed version of the episodes without any of the computer files
used in the episode's production. OLM wouldn't have any reason to
send
in the first place, y'know? So without the raw animation tools
used to create the episode in the first place, TPCI wouldn't have been
able to edit Aloe's apron away.

Japanese Home Video Release
When it comes to the edits in "The
Nomose Great Marsh's Gureggru Festival!?", I was able to prove that
the character re-design in that episode were done by the Japanese
animators thanks to the fact that the new version also appeared on the
Japanese rental DVDs. The original broadcast version will
probably never see an official release, ever.

With these Best Wishes
episodes, however, the unedited version that aired on
TV-Tokyo is what's present on the DVD. The newly animated
de-apron'd version is nowhere to be found.

My guess is that pretty much nobody in Japan knows
or cares about any racist undertones present in Aloe's design.
For them, she's just a black lady with an apron. With the
Gureggru episode, the potential legal issues that would have led to the
edits in that episode in the first place would have been on the Japan
side of things, making a release of the litigious version in that
country an unwise move. An edited version of the Aloe episodes,
on the other hand, wouldn't make as much sense since the only people
who seem to have any problems with it are people outside Japan.

I guess it would be fair to say that the edits that took place in this
episode are like the extra scenes in Pokémon 4Ever, or the
extra scenes animated for the show's fourth season opening theme, "Born
to Be a Winner." They were done by the same Japanese animators
who work on the TV show but are
only used for the international versions of the show. The same
thing seems to apply here: Aloe's apron was edited away by the
Japanese animators but was only used for versions of the show outside
of Japan.

Final Thoughts
In the grand scheme of things, this edit is no more intrusive than the
edit to Rougela's skin color. It sucks that the animators
basically had to create two versions of these three episodes,
especially given all the other episodes that required retooling during
this time period, but at least their work is done. Hopefully,
there won't be any more characters who require re-designs in order to
make them acceptable to foreign markets and everyone will be able to
enjoy the same characters on both sides of the Pacific.